1830 August 23, Woodbourne, to Brother, Philadelphia

              Woodbourne 8 month 23d. 1830.

My Dear Brother:



I now write to thee, under the pressure of misfortune.-  my dwelling house, & nearly all its contents have been reduced to ashes.  the result of two years' toil, anxiety, & incessant thought & attention have gone, as it were in an instant, beyond recall.  I had advanced so far in my improvements, that I began to indulge the hope that their completion might be effected, & I enabled to enjoy some advantage from them, & some degree of repose from the troublesome kind of occupation which they gave me.-  the exterior was handsomely painted, the windows hung with green [verition] shutters & I had made an agreement with a person to plaister the rooms.-  this, my dear brother, is a misfortune that I find hard to bear.  it has come upon me so suddenly & unexpectedly!-  it seems doubly so, when I reflect upon ye time and thought that is has required to plan ye various conveniences that had been constructed, and the labour that had been spent in collecting & preparing what I had, in & about my house.  I had formed an attachment to almost everything that I had obtained ye possession of in this way, & enjoyed a degree of satisfaction in reflecting upon ye difficulties that I had overcome.  I feel at present, as if I had scarcely spirit & fortitude enough to continue a method of getting along with my concerns & business.  to be without a house on a farm, is truly embarrassing.  thou hast sympathized with me, my dear brother, in temporal afflictions, with which both of us have been equally affected & concerned, & I have no doubt but that thou wilt in this.  I feel a wish to fly to thee for consolation, as well as to avoid ye sight of ye ruins of my dwelling, which stare me constantly in ye face.  but I seem to be tied here, as there is no one to attend to my concerns in my absense, & I am also aware that no human power can heal the wounds inflicted by misfortune.-  I have rece'd, dear brother, another deeply instructive lesson on ye uncertainty & instability of earthly possessions.  to be sure, a calamity of ye kind that has befallen me, seems light, when we reflect upon ye comparatively short period of existence here, and of the primary & unspeakably greater importance of securing an interest & inheritance in the world to come.  but we are so constituted, that ye feelings of our nature, appear as if they wd. at times obtain ye mastery over us.  mine seem as if they would sometimes overcome me.-  I will be obliged by thy not showing this letter to others, as it contains some of ye outpourings of my feelings, whilst smarting under misfortune, and which I shall perhaps be ashamed of, after I shall have had time to stay my mind on ye foundation